In the 13 years since I wrote the 1999 column, we have all moved away from that beautiful neighborhood of green lawns, big trees and wide streets. We moved south, we moved north, we moved downtown. But we all stayed in Austin and stayed in touch, as we changed and the city changed around us.

My friend Martha died of metastatic breast cancer in 2002. She was only 44. Don’t ever let anybody tell you “your attitude is everything” when it comes to cancer. Martha had an incredible attitude and she did everything she could to live. But she died anyway.

Lee and our son went to different colleges, graduated, then came back to Austin. They both work at a software company here in town and have stayed close friends.

Skylerr works and has a beautiful young daughter. Her brother J.J. recently graduated from college. I hadn’t seen either of them in a few years, but had kept up with them through their mother and another close family friend.

It was that friend who called on Sunday night in mid-April. She was so upset, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Finally, I did: J.J, age 26, had died in a car wreck.

So, we were all together again, this time at J.J.’s mother’s house, then, a few days later, at a small college chapel for his memorial service. We talked about J.J., of course. To me, he was still the gentle kid with the sweet face who’d befriended our son and made him feel welcome when we first moved to the neighborhood.

But he had grown up — as all our children had by now — and become a man with his own ambitions and passions. Since he died so young, he would forever remain a 26-year-old with great dreams. It was heartbreaking, it was wrenching, it was unfair — and the goddamned sun kept coming up and going down, day after day, in this pitiless fucking universe.

No wonder we huddle so closely together at times like this, no wonder an old neighborhood re-forms overnight. It’s freezing cold out there, random, unpredictable, terrifying, and anything can happen. How could we have forgotten that? And who wants to be alone and isolated now that we realize it once again?

So, we talk, we drink, we embrace, we cry. And, as usual, at times like this, we also laugh and remember lighter topics. Like the neighbor who used to get drunk and announce her husband “required” her to have sex every night; she was currently petitioning, she said slurrily, for Thursdays off. (They are now married to other people; the status of the “Thursdays off” petition remains unknown.) Or another neighbor who, upon hearing the Thursday petition story, begged everyone not to repeat it to her husband. He always suspected everyone else was having sex a lot more than they were — and now, here was the proof.

We recalled how our sons had conducted votes about whose mother was the “nicest,” whose mother was the best cook. (I always lost those contests, big time.)

I said how, after Pam’s mother died in ’99, how impressed I’d been that everyone had gathered night after night to bring food and wine, to talk, to comfort her. “But it was really like that all the time,” someone else said. “We were always in and out of each other’s houses, sharing meals, having parties.

“When you think about it,” she said, “when we were there, it was really the golden age of Gilbert Street.”

Oh, yes, the Golden Age. Like any other era or event, you don’t appreciate its luster till you look back at it. We toasted our golden age, our past, our children — lost or grown. We toasted and drank wine because, really, what else could we do?

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

For a loosely related post, read about yogis and wine snobs.

(Blogger’s note: We moved to our old neighborhood in Austin in 1997. Below is a column I wrote for the Dallas Morning News about our neighbors and life on our block in the spring of 1999. Part two will be about getting together with some of our old neighbors recently, looking back on some of the changes we’ve all been through since the original column.)

Like everyone else in the bleachers, we went to the baseball game for different reasons.

I was there because it was spring break, and I couldn’t get any work done. No wonder. There were four adolescents sprawled in the living room next to my office. They were inhaling soft drinks, cackling and making fun of the horror movies they were watching.

Wouldn’t a baseball game be healthier than that? I’d always wanted to take my son to a University of Texas baseball game, anyway. That was one of those things I’d filed in some kind of “remember to do someday” list in my mind. Besides, it was a beautiful spring day.

I gave the kids strict instructions they all had to bring baseball gloves so they could catch any balls that came our way. If I got clobbered by a line drive, I hinted ominously, I’d quickly lose my good humor and immediately cut off my son’s supply of junk food.

The kids came back to our house with money and baseball gloves and piled into the car — my son and his friends Skylerr, J.J. and Lee. Lee’s a year or two younger than the other kids, with a sweet face and big, brown eyes.

Earlier that morning, Lee had gone to see his grandmother in the hospital. She was a charming, vibrant woman — the kind of grandmother every child should have — who took the neighborhood kids to parties, miniature golf and amusement arcades. Three weeks earlier, she’d checked into the hospital for a routine hysterectomy and had never come home. She’d been diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer.

“It ward hard for Lee to see her — the way she’s changed,” Lee’s mother, Pam, said when I called her. “I’ve seen her every day, and I guess I just didn’t realize how much she’d changeed.”

But that afternoon, we didn’t have to think about any of this. We could go to the baseball game.

The kids spilled out of the car, laughing at some of the worst jokes I’ve ever heard, elbowing one another and racing to stand in line at the box office. I parked the car with my friend Martha, and she and I trekked back to the baseball stadium, winding our way through jammed parking lots and medians with shaggy new grass. The four kids were waiting in line by the time we got there, thumping their baseball gloves, practically vibrating with excitement.

“I’m starving,” my son said, since it had been at least an hour since his last meal.

We sat in the bleachers, close to first base, and the kids promptly forgot they were supposed to be protecting me from stray line drives. They leaned over the cyclone fence, right along the “Do Not Lean on This Fence” sign, and demolished several rounds of nachos, boxes of stale popcorn, and soft drinks the size of one of the smaller Great Lakes.

Martha and I sat in the bleachers and chatted idly about books we’d read, people we knew, and trips we’d taken. We talked about a lot of things. But what we didn’t talk about was the checkup Martha had scheduled later in the week — the blood tests and CT scans to see whether her cancer was still in remission.

Instead, we talked about lots of other topics, and sometimes we even watched the game. The college guys who played were lean and good-looking as they stretched, heaved the ball, and dived for bases. To look at them, so young and earnest, you’d think they were untouched by life’s sadnesses and limitations. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe that’s a foolish assumption you make when you don’t know anything at all about someone else’s life.

We watched them play this game, where there were rules, predictability, clear definitions and scoreboards. We had to leave before the end of the game and maybe, I thought, that was just as well, since Texas was losing. We walked back into the world where spring was green and fragrant and where lives were ending and going forward.

It took us days till we understood more. We’d left before some kind of thrilling, late-inning rally by UT to win — the most exciting part of the game and we’d missed it, Martha told me over the phone the next day. We were both irritated. How pathetic can you get, we asked each other, leaving a baseball game at exactly the wrong moment?

The days passed as spring break unwound like some sort of wild, chaotically colored kite string. The kids ran up and down the block and spent the night at each other’s houses. Lee’s grandmother died that week. The beautiful weather turned to rain, then back to brilliantly blue skies. Martha learned she’d have to go to the hospital for a biopsy.

My son loved the baseball game so much, he said, that he wants to go back for his birthday. Why not? I think. It’s his thirteenth birthday today, and we’ll go wherever he wants to go. We’ll watch the game if we feel like it. We’ll wait for the final score and hope it delights us again this time. And whenever we get the chance, we’ll lean on the fence or anything else that holds us up.

While we’re there, we’ll watch the clouds gather and pass and gather again. Spring is like that, you know.

(Copyright 1999 by Ruth Pennebaker)

For a loosely related post, please see our version of the neighborhood watch, which some people might call “nosiness”

After four hours of a cooking class, I’m still hopeless. Read it
here.

I am not much of a hero worshiper. It’s too disillusioning and I’m a little too cynical. Things fall apart, and so do heroic images. Even lovable human beings are fallible, leaving you with their clay feet and messy imperfections, along with your own shattered ideals. You grow up, you get a little wiser, you move on.

Still, I was once young and worshipful and haven’t entirely escaped my childish excesses. When I saw Fess Parker a few years ago, I swooned. Who cared about the other arts honorees who’d probably won Pulitzers, Nobels, Oscars and Emmys, for all I cared? I was in the presence of greatness, I was in the presence of Davy Crockett, and all of a sudden that Born-on-a-Mountaintop song unspooled in my mind and I once again wanted a coonskin cap and fringed jacket more than anything else in the universe. (Those unfulfilled dreams — they never let you go.)

Unfortunately, Fess died and now, everybody knows that Davy Crockett might not have been the great hero who succumbed at the Alamo, fighting back to back with his friend Georgie Russell. In these matters of childhood worship, though, I’m more of the frame of mind expressed by the journalist in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

(My husband, an unsentimental sort who didn’t grow up reading and watching Westerns the way I did, is highly critical of the Alamo as an incubator of heroes. “The Texans were just a bunch of land-grabbers,” he’ll say complacently, while I begin to scream in a semi-deranged way that Spain and Mexico didn’t really own the land, either, since they’d stolen it from the Indians, which I, as a one-quarter, card-carrying member of the Chickasaw tribe harbor great resentments about. “Well, anyway, they were stupid to die there,” my husband will continue complacently and infuriatingly, which almost always leads to one of those Shut Up, She Explained imbroglios. Why, oh, why?)

Even at my advanced age, though, I have to admit I still veer into dangerous hero worshiping territory now and then. Not of politicians, of course — I do have rational limits. No, I’m finding myself a little too worshipful of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (This is not as completely irrational, blind and pathetic as it might seem; as a matter of fact, I once sat next to Colbert at a Broadway play and we talked for a good 45 seconds, as I recall.)

But, still! I know I’m on dangerous turf here. I watch these two guys a few times a week, laughing and bursting with admiration, trusting them because, after all, who else is there to trust in this uncertain and miserable world? I know I’m risking heartbreak and loss of my illusions and I live in fear that one or both of these guys will get caught doing something heinous and then what will I do?

My heroes have always been cowboys, but now they’re comedians. You have to stay flexible in this world, I tell myself.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

The first thing you should know about Frankfort, Kentucky, is that it’s the state capital.

Not Lexington or Louisville or any of the more obvious choices, but Frankfort. Like the other, unfamiliar state capitals of Carson City, Nevada, Augusta, Maine, or Salem, Oregon, Frankfort could always come in handy if you’re in a trivia contest; you never know when one of those events is going to pop up in your life. Better be prepared, I always say.

Frankfort is also a pretty little town of rolling foothills, a looming state capitol building and Daniel Boone’s monumental gravesite. More important to me, though, is the second thing you should know: It’s where my sister got married this week.

She and her now-husband Mike got married 24 hours after the tornado sirens wailed, a funnel cloud hopscotched around the town, and the rain was so torrential it slanted horizontally. (My sister has always liked drama.)

By the time they said their vows in a nearby nature preserve, though, the clouds were white and harmlessly puffy and the breeze was mild. My sister looked radiant in a deep purple dress Mike referred to as “eggplant” and a neutral-colored hat. Mike, whom I’d just met the day before, looked pretty good himself.

The officiating judge wore his black robe and spoke in a deep, appropriately respectful baritone. The guests — 30 or so who were mostly Mike’s friends and family, since Frankfort is his home town — gathered around in a semi-circle.

Both my sister and Mike were widowed after long marriages. They had worked together decades ago at an El Paso radio station and became friends again over the Internet. When I heard Mike had traveled with my sister to some of her favorite haunts in Eastern Europe like Sarajevo and Bucharest, I realized it must be love.

My sister has lived abroad for most of her adult life, first in Israel and now in Poland. Her life and mine have been almost entirely different — hers adventurous, childless, and — again — full of drama. I’m forever fascinated by the vastly different wants and needs people have in their lives, in what is most important to them.

So, in many obvious ways, my sister and I are very different. But that overlooks the profound ways she and I are so similar. We have virtually identical senses of humor, writing styles, minds and curiosity about the world. She is the person who came and stayed with us when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, who sat and watched movies with me in the afternoon till I fell asleep, who came along when I got my hair shorn off before it fell out.

“You have nice ears,” she said, staring at the floor. She didn’t know what else to say, she said later; what a stupid remark. I felt differently. It made me smile at a time when I didn’t have much to smile about.

In so many ways, she and I understand each other better than anyone else ever will — husbands, children, or good friends. We were the only two who shared a childhood in a series of small ranch houses in desolate towns where the wind spat red dust. We were the only witnesses to a family life with a treacherous undercurrent of bitterness and rage. (I’ve never quite understood people like my husband who had happy childhoods.)

But that was the long-buried past. In the present, I saw my sister happy and in love with a great guy who is crazy about her. I can think of few things in the world that could make me happier. May they have a wonderful life together.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

My sister is an excellent writer. Please check out earlier posts she’s written for this site on: teaching English in Poland, Polish traditions, Fat Thursdays, and recovering after a great loss

I went to lunch with my younger friend E last week. E is one of the funniest people I know. She has opinions about everything from politics to the latest cheap sex scandal making the headlines. I call that well-rounded.

I like having friends like E who are a different age. It means I get to offer occasional nuggets of 24K wisdom and, since I haven’t given birth to the other person, she doesn’t roll her eyes or make gagging noises till she’s a few blocks away.

The last time we got together, which was at a party at a nearby bar, I confided to her that I had once been an award-winning hula hooper at the Holiday Inn South in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early 1980s. (The prize was always the same: a free weekend at the Holiday Inn South, which wasn’t all that desirable, but how do you refuse a free weekend anywhere?)

Anyway, E pretended not to believe me, which is why I ended up hula-hooping that day in the backyard of the bar — just to show her, since, God knows, who needs that kind of unwelcome and inappropriate attention at my age?

This time, we met for lunch at a coffee place downtown. The weather was flawless — a sky the color of bluebonnets and a warm sun. It was clear to me we needed to sit outside, since, any day now, this town was going to turn into the blast oven we Texans call summer.

E looked around at the outside tables and noted in an ominous tone there were lots of birds around. (She’s a little high-strung, like most of my friends.) I told her she’d been watching too many Alfred Hitchcock movies, so we sat down, even though E kept swiveling her head and fretting about the pigeons.

Our food arrived. So did the pigeons. They swooped in and rested on a nearby table, watching us.

By then, though, E was telling me the wonderful story of how she and her husband are on the waiting list to adopt a baby. I found this quite exciting since a) E will be a great mother and b) this is the closest I’ve come, so far, to being a pretend grandmother.

Two pigeons hovered over my vegetarian chili. I yelled and beat them off. E reminded me she’d predicted the birds might be awful. I said not to sidetrack me when we had much more important things to discuss, such as my impending almost-grandmotherhood.

The pigeons adjourned to another, recently vacated table. They greedily shared the remains of a grilled cheese sandwich. Another pigeon showed up to eat the salad. I stuck a plastic spoon in my chili and tried to concentrate on my upcoming status change.

What did I want the baby to call me? Something glamorous and modern and with-it, obviously. 

More pigeons showed up for the dinner party. They fluttered and pecked. One tried to fly off with a stringy tomato hanging from its beak.

What’s wrong with Coco? It sounded so, I don’t know, chic. Maybe, too, this would signal a new era in my life, when I could score a Chanel jacket, instead of just talking about it and boring my friends with all my constantly babbled-about but perennially unconsummated plans. Like, say, my recently shipwrecked plans to go to Colombia. God, I was never going to live that one down.

The pigeon brunch went on at the next table, with some departing and new arrivals showing up. E announced she was losing her appetite. I pointed out she’d already cleaned her plate, anyway, so what was the problem? The pigeons squawked and flapped their wings. I noticed my vegetarian chili — mostly untouched — was beginning to look revolting.

So, E and I got up and carried our trays to the window. Behind us, four pigeons crowded at our old table, pecking at scraps and flapping their wings. E said she was never going to eat outside again. I said yes, I hated nature, too. It was too uncivilized, just like Republicans.

E had to go shopping, so she took off down the street. I waved at her and wondered whether the baby would mind if his/her almost-grandmother took the nickname of a known Nazi sympathizer, however chic. Probably he/she would.

So, I’d better keep searching. I might as well feed Coco to the pigeons, since they seemed to be omnivorous today.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

I don’t know who it was — but the person responsible for making Austin’s bat colony a tourist attraction was a P.R. genius.

Somebody like me, say, would have looked at a colony of 1.5 million bats hanging under a major bridge and thought, Ick! Rodents! Flying rats! And, aren’t bats rabid? But the unnamed PR genius saw an opportunity that’s become one of this city’s great tourist attractions.

At dusk, from March to November, crowds gather at the Congress Avenue Bridge to wait for nightly departure of what is now the largest urban bat colony in the country. That’s where my husband and I were last night — waiting with tourists and locals who sported cameras and leaned expectantly on the railing. On either side of the river, small crowds had gathered, too, sitting on the grass. Two boats populated with onlookers hovered just on the other side of the bridge.

As it grew darker, camera lights flashed from every direction — tiny points of light. My husband and I couldn’t get a place at the railing, so we stood on tiptoes, craning our necks. Nothing. Just an iridescent sky, with silvery clouds, easing into night as the sun set. We have the most beautiful skies on earth in Texas; it’s a world you can lose yourself in, that makes even the most determined agnostic think there might possibly be a God — otherwise, where did this vast and gorgeous sky come from?

But my husband and I were here to see the bats, not the sky. We figured the bats owed us one, since they hadn’t shown up last week when we came here with friends from New York. But here we were, once again, waiting. The wind picked up a little and it grew cooler (the kind of coolness we will pine for, come July and August) and we waited, with everyone else, for the show to begin.

Still, activities aren’t always that simple and straightforward. We were here because I had to leave the condo, had to move, had to try to divert myself for a little while. We had just heard the kind of news that crushes your soul and reminds you of how merciless life can be: A young man from our old neighborhood, who had often played at our house and hung out with our son, had been killed in a car wreck.

I kept seeing him, with his sweet, dear face, I kept seeing his mother and aching for her. The death of someone my age is sad, but the death of someone young is something entirely different and unbearable.

So there we were, waiting for the bats that weren’t showing up yet again, hoping for what I don’t know. Just a little release for a few minutes. Couldn’t we have that? No, we couldn’t.

So, we turned and walked back down the sidewalk on the bridge, when a sudden murmur rose up and people applauded and cameras flashed. We moved back toward the railing, peering through it, as a dark flood of wings swept out and disappeared into the night. They poured out endlessly, occasional wings illuminated by camera bulbs — just an instant of light on one small winged body, almost like the curve of an envelope flap — then the darkness again.

Even when the camera flashes had extinguished and you couldn’t see much any more, you knew that rush of movement still went on as more than a million little bodies hurtled on, guided by sound and instinct into the night. After a few minutes, my husband and I left, walking slowly, finding our own way home.

We returned to a world where hearts had broken and lives would never be the same and no one was safe. But for a few short minutes, we had escaped, we had flown, we had seen the bats.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

I believe I have explained my little obsession with driving.

In short, I am a Texan and many of the most important moments of my life have taken place in a car. You can fill in the blanks yourself, since I don’t write one of those smutty, tell-all blogs. No, except for my fondness for certain four-letter words and blatant exaggeration, I am all about nuance.

But, back to this driving business. I believe my husband and I have reached a tipping point.

We’ve now been in our downtown condo for 15 months. He rides the bus to work. I stroll down the hall to work. We walk a lot. We go for days without using either of our two cars, which sit in the condo garage.

The truth is pretty obvious: We don’t really need two cars. This has been an occasional topic of conversation between us recently.

We are in total agreement: This is crazy. We don’t need two cars. We should get rid of one.

We are also in total disagreement: “What do you mean, I should sell my car? Why don’t you sell yours?” You know, the kind of discussion that deteriorates rapidly into bared teeth and slurs on the lack of reasoning power of the opposite sex.

Buying real property, you see, we have learned to compromise without drawing blood. Or much blood, anyway. We have learned to appreciate each other’s little quirks such as, for example, the fact I have really good taste and my husband does not. But, whatever!

When it comes to cars, though, we haven’t had to share or compromise. For 30 years, we’ve been able to — how should I say it? — express our individuality through our cars. We’ve driven an assortment of vehicles ranging from absolute junkers to luxury vehicles — VW bugs, one Plymouth, one Cadillac, Toyotas, Volvos, BMWs, Lexuses, Infinitis.

Most recently, he’s been able to salve his social conscience by buying a Prius. Since I prefer a bit more freeway power than a lawnmower, I drive a sportier Japanese model.

I consider everything we’ve shared over the years: apartments, houses, condos, beds, toothbrushes, trips, sabbaticals, childbirth, children, pets, meals, movies, money, tax returns, illnesses, surgeries, deaths, jokes, conversations, laughs, meltdowns, politics, secrets, disagreements, triumphs, disappointments, droughts, ticks, head lice, rodent infestations, deluges, tennis, racquetball, graduations, funerals, weddings, pink eye.

You would think, given all this history, sharing a car would be a snap. But maybe that’s the beauty of a long marriage: Now and then, a stealthy undertow can still surprise you and you realize too-tranquil waters are really overrated.

He says driving an Infiniti wouldn’t kill him, as long as it’s a hybrid. I tell him an Infiniti hybrid costs too much. The new, bigger Prius, though — we could maybe negotiate about that.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read a loosely related post that struggles to use driving as a metaphor

I should have known I was lying when I loudly announced, years ago, that I would never, ever be caught quick or dead on a stairmaster. (This fervor had been aroused by one of the most depressing sights I’ve ever witnessed: a young woman grimly pumping away on the stairmaster while reading The Bell Jar.)

No, not me. I was going to embrace life and nature by being outside and by doing exercise I actually enjoyed like yoga and walking. No more soulless, joy-killing, sweat-soaked exercise regimens on draconian machines. No mas!

But then, things happened, such as moving to a building with an incredible gym that overlooks the river and hike and bike trail. Being a total hypocrite, I took up with the elliptical machine, the new, improved version of the stairmaster. I can read on it — and divert myself from my own suffering and everybody else’s, as long as I stay away from the Sylvia Plath.

Let’s face it, though: You can’t read anything deep while you’re on the elliptical. There are certain genres that lend themselves to pumping iron or titanium or whatever the hell it is, and certain genres that do not. So I’ve found myself madly in love with Elmore Leonard and his Raylan Givens stories recently. Then I moved on to John Burdett, whose most recent thriller set in Thailand is Vulture Peak.

Vulture Peak is the kind of novel that makes you despair about the human race, what with its human organ-trafficking and gore and betrayals. But, given the current political bloodletting and ideological savagery in this country and abroad, despair is beginning to feel like a perfectly natural reaction to just about everything.

I digress, of course. I’m always digressing, but now I’m getting worse. Anyway, the point I was planning to make — much earlier than this, but don’t quibble — was that reading this book, I stumbled across something else very disquieting. A personal soupcon of danger and intrigue.

Heaving and sweating on the elliptical machine, I was very taken with the narrator’s description of opium. Here’s this terrible, dangerous, cutthroat world — but opium softens the edges, blunts the depression, makes it all go away into a soft and dreamy haze.

The chances of my trying opium are nil, but reading about it, I could understand its appeal. It was that same dangerous glimmer of recognition I got years ago, when my family and I went on our one and only skiing trip to a resort outside Montreal. The skiing — well, you can forget that. I spent the whole day on my backside, like an ice turtle. (My husband, always the optimist, announced that he’d done quite well on the slopes. He got quieter when our daughter reminded him he’d ploughed into a fence.)

Again, who cares about the skiing? I want to talk about the danger of French-Canadian food. It was high-fat, high-carb — my own little idea of culinary heaven. I sopped up the thick gravies and sauces and breads, then moved on to the dessert line, with its rich cakes and buttery toppings. It was, maybe, my third time in line when it occurred to me that if I lived in Quebec, with its brutal winters and heavy foods, I’d be a total goner. I’d be fulfilling my ancient Indian lineage, just sitting on an ice floe, eating blubber, waiting for the sun to come up.

At this juncture, I need to say I understand the related, inherent dangers in both opium and gluttony. But why did the same mental alarm bells start going off when I recently watched an episode on HGTV, the channel that specializes in real estate buying, selling and renovation? (Admittedly, I already knew I had a bit of an obsession about real estate, but felt I was handling my little problem pretty well.)

So I sat and watched the program Curb Appeal, where people who live in pretty crappy-looking houses are saved by designers and decorators and architects who swoop in and change everything. I sat on the couch watching it, thoroughly immersed, enthralled, limp with delight. I realized I lacked the will to ever get up from the couch or change the channel. I mean, real estate pornography is my life, almost as much as carbohydrates.

Eventually, I got hungry or something and gathered the moral strength to stand up and turn off the TV, and for the past three days have gone cold turkey on HGTV. At least I know some of my weaknesses, I think: reading about opium, living in Canada, and watching HGTV.

I would say I’ll never, ever be indulging myself again — but look at the elliptical. I think I’ll keep my lip zipped this time.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

For loosely related posts on What Women Want, please read about real estate ownership and cereal.

You know, it had already been a rough week.

“I worry about humanity and human nature! I worry about the future!” I’d dramatically announced to my husband Sunday after reading something that had deeply offended me. (What? I no longer recall. But likely perpetrators include Republicans, investment bankers, and other salient examples of what the judge in “What’s Up Doc?” called “a mass of human debris.”)

Two mornings after this proclamation, I found myself stuck in a monstrous traffic jam on my way to physical therapy for my shoulder. I was already a bit morose, since it has occurred to me I will never, ever graduate from physical therapy.

Forty-five minutes later, still sitting on the same damned frontage road, inching along, talking to myself, talking to the other drivers, even if they couldn’t hear me, I realized I would murder, maim, dismember and/or torture anybody who stopped me from making the next green light. I would also worry about humanity and human nature and the future of humankind later, after I’d extracted myself from this automotive mess.

But that was the good part of the week. Wednesday morning, I sailed into my dentist’s office for an epic visit to prepare three of my molars for new crowns — one of which was necessitated by my recent and tragic collision with a cakeball. This triple scheduling brings up many profound questions, such as, What in the hell was I thinking?

I was dangling upside down, making wisecracks to my dentist and his hygienist while they worked on me. Once they shot me repeatedly with Novocaine and my mouth went heavy and dead, it was harder to make wisecracks. But I kept trying. I wasn’t sure whether I looked like the aforementioned bat or a fly in a spider web, but I did feel I was at a definite postural disadvantage.

They shined bright lights, they drilled, they scraped, they poked, they rinsed, they suctioned, they started all over again. Minutes passed, then hours and centuries. I tried to distract myself by thinking about our financial situation. Normally — in a yoga class, say — money is something I can obsess about for hours. Today, when I was the object of a drill, it held less fascination.

“You’re doing well,” my dentist said.

“Thank you,” his assistant said.

“He was talking to me,” I said — or tried to say.

The next time he issued the same compliment, she and I both chorused “Thank you!” in unison. After that, I took to complimenting myself silently. You are so brave! I told myself, over and over. It was kind of like a self-affirmation.

I tried not to think about my two major dental fears: 1) that somebody will drop an instrument down my throat and I will choke to death; and 2) that, when they’re taking an impression, the gunk will harden and they won’t be able to remove it.

Instead, I just hung there, thinking heretical thoughts, such as, Would dentures really be so bad? Are you sure? Time crawled on, second by second, tiny grains of sand, the days of our lives. You are so brave!

Finally — ancient fillings removed, teeth smoothed, teeth watered and suctioned and sealed — they wedged an impression in my mouth and let it set. And set and set. I began to get uncomfortable. There was something pushing against the back of my mouth, close to my throat. “Help,” I said.

They righted me in the chair and kept telling me it was almost over. “Breathe through your nose,” the dentist said. “Breathe through your nose,” his assistant echoed.

Minutes later, after the impression was removed, the dentist showed me the great gob of impression material that had oozed off on its own, heading toward my throat and making me gag. “No wonder you were complaining,” he said. “That must have been awful.”

You are so brave!

He shook his head. “I’m just making sure this impression is good enough,” he said.

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “It had better be. I don’t want any more of that stuff in my throat.” My voice seemed to have all the moral authority of a gerbil’s.

Later, when I staggered off, paid a four-figure out-of-pocket fee, and went out to buy a smoothie, I had second thoughts. My mouth was coming back to life and so was my mind. I wondered whether I could have died in that dental chair, choking on some kind of gook, carried out in a body bag. Just what I’d always feared most: an ignominious death.

It had been some week. I started out as Joan of Arc and ended up as Deep Throat. Although I could have sworn Linda Lovelace got paid for everything she swallowed.

(Copyright 2012 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read a somewhat related post on the true story of my black eye